Seattle 1990
It was crazy then, but nice crazy ... not "they're coming to take me away" crazy like it is now.

I left Seattle not long after I took this photo.
It was crazy then, but nice crazy ... not "they're coming to take me away" crazy like it is now.
(written in 2003 by kim - Splendid Isolation @ www kimdutoit dot com)
Submitted by ghostsniper as a comment
A re-printed article
Prequel: from "After The Pussification" - an explanation by Kim Du Toit of the web site "Splendid Isolation"
For those who’ve been living on another planet for the past two decades, I once wrote a screed called The Pussification Of The Western Male, which took about an hour to write and was a stream-of-consciousness rant against the demeaning of men in Western society. The piece garnered an immediate and voluminous online response (thank you, Insty), caused my host’s (website and email) servers to crash and necessitated finding a new host because they kicked me off.
Follows is the forbidden text. The article is long enough that the post is an excerpt with a rarely used "Read More"
We have become a nation of women.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.
There was a time when men went to their certain death, with expressions like “You all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas.” (Davy Crockett, to the House of Representatives, before going to the Alamo.)
There was a time when men went to war, sometimes against their own families, so that other men could be free. And there was a time when men went to war because we recognized evil when we saw it, and knew that it had to be stamped out.
There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.
We’re not like that anymore.
Read the whole article - if you dare ... and the follow-up
Continue reading →(written in 2003 by kim - Splendid Isolatio @ www kimdutoit dot com)
Submitted by ghostsniper as a comment
Prequel: from "After The Pussification" - an explanation
For those who’ve been living on another planet for the past two decades, I once wrote a screed called The Pussification Of The Western Male, which took about an hour to write and was a stream-of-consciousness rant against the demeaning of men in Western society. The piece garnered an immediate and voluminous online response (thank you, Insty), caused my host’s (website and email) servers to crash and necessitated finding a new host because they kicked me off.
Follows is the forbidden text:
We have become a nation of women.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.
There was a time when men went to their certain death, with expressions like “You all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas.” (Davy Crockett, to the House of Representatives, before going to the Alamo.)
There was a time when men went to war, sometimes against their own families, so that other men could be free. And there was a time when men went to war because we recognized evil when we saw it, and knew that it had to be stamped out.
There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.
We’re not like that anymore.
Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of “good guy vs. bad guy” that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.
Now, men are taught that violence is bad — that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to “give him what he wants”, instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.
Now, men’s fashion includes not a man dressed in a double-breasted suit, but a tight sweater worn by a man with breasts.
Now, warning labels are indelibly etched into gun barrels, as though men have somehow forgotten that guns are dangerous things.
Now, men are given Ritalin as little boys, so that their natural aggressiveness, curiosity and restlessness can be controlled, instead of nurtured and directed.
How did we get to this?
In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother. It wasn’t always so: there was a time when it was Father who ruled the home, worked at his job, and voted.
But in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media — and mostly, this has not been a good thing. When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more “protective” (i.e. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger. It was therefore inevitable that their feminine influence on politics was going to emphasize (lowercase “s”) social security.
I am aware of the fury that this statement is going to arouse, and I don’t care a fig.
What I care about is the fact that since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a concerted campaign to denigrate men, to reduce them to figures of fun, and to render them impotent, figuratively speaking.
I’m going to illustrate this by talking about TV, because TV is a reliable barometer of our culture.
In the 1950s, the TV Dad was seen as the lovable goofball — perhaps the beginning of the trend — BUT he was still the one who brought home the bacon, and was the main source of discipline (think of the line: “Wait until your father gets home!”).
From that, we went to this: the Cheerios TV ad.
Now, for those who haven’t seen this piece of shit, I’m going to go over it, from memory, because it epitomizes everything I hate about the campaign to pussify men. The scene opens at the morning breakfast table, where the two kids are sitting with Dad at the table, while Mom prepares stuff on the kitchen counter. The dialogue goes something like this:
Little girl (note, not little boy): Daddy, why do we eat Cheerios?
Dad: Because they contain fiber, and all sorts of stuff that’s good for the heart. I eat it now, because of that.
LG: Did you always eat stuff that was bad for your heart, Daddy?
Dad (humorously): I did, until I met your mother.
Mother (not humorously): Daddy did a lot of stupid things before he met your mother.
Now, every time I see that TV ad, I have to be restrained from shooting the TV with a .45 Colt. If you want a microcosm of how men have become less than men, this is the perfect example.
What Dad should have replied to Mommy’s little dig: “Yes, Sally, that’s true: I did do a lot of stupid things before I met your mother. I even slept with your Aunt Ruth a few times, before I met your mother.”
That’s what I would have said, anyway, if my wife had ever attempted to castrate me in front of the kids like that.
But that’s not what men do, of course. What this guy is going to do is smile ruefully, finish his cereal, and then go and fuck his secretary, who doesn’t try to cut his balls off on a daily basis. Then, when the affair is discovered, people are going to rally around the castrating bitch called his wife, and call him all sorts of names. He’ll lose custody of his kids, and they will be brought up by our ultimate modern-day figure of sympathy: The Single Mom.
You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.
When I first started this website, I think my primary aim was to blow off steam at the stupidity of our society.
Because I have fairly set views on what constitutes right and wrong, I have no difficulty in calling Bill Clinton, for example, a fucking liar and hypocrite.
But most of all, I do this website because I love being a man. Amongst other things, I talk about guns, self-defense, politics, beautiful women, sports, warfare, hunting, and power tools — all the things that being a man entails. All this stuff gives me pleasure.
And it doesn’t take much to see when all the things I love are being threatened: for instance, when Tim Allen’s excellent comedy routine on being a man is reduced to a fucking sitcom called Home Improvement. The show should have been called Man Improvement, because that’s what every single plotline entailed: turning a man into a “better” person, instead of just leaving him alone to work on restoring the vintage sports car in his garage. I stopped watching the show after about four episodes.
(The Man Show was better, at least for the first season — men leering at chicks, men fucking around with ridiculous games like “pin the bra on the boobies”, men having beer-drinking competitions, and women bouncing on trampolines. Excellent stuff, only not strong enough. I don’t watch it anymore, either, because it’s plain that the idea has been subverted by girly-men, and turned into a parody of itself.)
Finally, we come to the TV show which to my mind epitomizes everything bad about what we have become: Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. Playing on the homo Bravo Channel, this piece of excrement has taken over the popular culture by storm (and so far, the only counter has been the wonderful South Park episode which took it apart for the bullshit it is).
I’m sorry, but the premise of the show nauseates me. A bunch of homosexuals trying to “improve” ordinary men into something “better” (i.e. more acceptable to women): changing the guy’s clothes, his home decor, his music — for fuck’s sake, what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?
Yes, the men are, by and large, slobs. Big fucking deal. Last time I looked, that’s normal. Men are slobs, and that only changes when women try to civilize them by marriage. That’s the natural order of things.
You know the definition of homosexual men we used in Chicago? “Men with small dogs who own very tidy apartments.”
Real men, on the other hand, have big fucking mean-ass dogs: Rhodesian ridgebacks, bull terriers and Rottweilers, or else working dogs like pointers or retrievers which go hunting with them and slobber all over the furniture.
Women own lapdogs.
Which is why women are trying to get dog-fighting and cock-fighting banned — they’d ban boxing too, if they could — because it’s “mean and cruel”. No shit, Shirley. Hell, I hate the idea of fighting dogs too, but I don’t have a problem with men who do. Dogs and cocks fight. So do men. No wonder we have an affinity for it.
My website has become fairly popular with men, and in the beginning, this really surprised me, because I didn’t think I was doing anything special.
That’s not what I think now. I must have had well over five thousand men write to me to say stuff like “Yes! I agree! I was so angry when I read about [insert atrocity of choice], but I thought I was the only one.”
No, you’re not alone, my friends, and nor am I.
Out there, there is a huge number of men who are sick of it. We’re sick of being made figures of fun and ridicule; we’re sick of having girly-men like journalists, advertising agency execs and movie stars decide on “what is a man”; we’re sick of women treating us like children, and we’re really fucking sick of girly-men politicians who pander to women by passing an ever-increasing raft of Nanny laws and regulations (the legal equivalent of public-school Ritalin), which prevent us from hunting, racing our cars and motorcycles, smoking, flirting with women at the office, getting into fistfights over women, shooting criminals and doing all the fine things which being a man entails.
When Annika Sorenstam was allowed to play in that tournament on the men’s PGA tour, all the men should have refused to play — Vijay Singh was the only one with balls to stand up for a principle, and he was absolutely excoriated for being a “chauvinist”. Bullshit. He wasn’t a chauvinist, he was being a man. All the rest of the players — Woods, Mickelson, the lot — are girls by comparison. And, needless to say, Vijay isn’t an American, nor a European, which is probably why he still has a pair hanging between his legs, and they’re not hanging on the wall as his wife’s trophy room.
Fuck this, I’m sick of it.
I don’t see why I should put up with this bullshit any longer — hell, I don’t see why any man should put up with this bullshit any longer.
I don’t see why men should have become feminized, except that we allowed it to happen — and you know why we let it happen? Because it’s damned easier to do so. Unfortunately, we’ve allowed it to go too far, and our maleness has become too pussified for words.
At this point, I could have gone two ways: the first would be to say, “…and I don’t know if we’ll get it back. The process has become too entrenched, the cultural zeitgeist of men as girls has become part of the social fabric, and there’s not much we can do about it.”
But I’m not going to do that. To quote John Belushi (who was, incidentally, a real man and not a fucking woman): “Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”
Well, I’m not going to quit. Fuck that. One of the characteristics of the non-pussified man (and this should strike fear into the hearts of women and girly-men everywhere) is that he never quits just because the odds seem overwhelming. Omaha Beach, guys.
I want a real man as President — not Al Gore, who had to hire a consultant to show him how to be an Alpha male, and french-kiss his wife on live TV to “prove” to the world that he was a man, when we all knew that real men don’t have to do that pathetic crap.
And I want the Real Man President to surround himself with other Real Men, like Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft, and yes, Condi Rice (who is more of a Real Man than those asswipes Colin Powell and Norman Mineta).
I want our government to be more like Dad — kind, helpful, but not afraid to punish us when we fuck up, instead of helping us excuse our actions.
I want our government of real men to start rolling back the Nanny State, in all its horrible manifestations of over-protectiveness, intrusiveness and “Mommy Knows Best What’s Good For You” regulations.
I want our culture to become more male — and not the satirical kind of male, like The Man Show, or the cartoonish figures of Stallone, Van Damme or Schwarzenegger. (Note to the Hollywood execs: We absolutely fucking loathe chick movies about feelings and relationships and all that feminine jive. We want more John Waynes, Robert Mitchums, Bruce Willises, and Clint Eastwoods. Never mind that it’s simplistic — we like simple, we are simple, we are men — our lives are uncomplicated, and we like it that way. We Were Soldiers was a great movie, and you know why? Because you could have cut out all the female parts and it still would have been a great movie, because it was about Real Men. Try cutting out all the female parts in a Woody Allen movie; you’d end up with the opening and closing credits.)
I want our literature to become more male, less female. Men shouldn’t buy “self-help” books unless the subject matter is car maintenance, golf swing improvement or how to disassemble a fucking Browning BAR. We don’t improve ourselves, we improve our stuff.
And finally, I want men everywhere to go back to being Real Men. To open doors for women, to drive fast cars, to smoke cigars after a meal, to get drunk occasionally and, in the words of the late Col. Jeff Cooper, one of the last of the Real Men: “To ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth.”
In every sense of the word. We know what the word “is” means.
Because that’s all that being a Real Man involves. You don’t have to become a fucking cartoon male, either: I’m not going back to stoning women for adultery like those Muslim assholes do, nor am I suggesting we support that perversion of being a Real Man, gangsta rap artists (those fucking pussies — they wouldn’t last thirty seconds against a couple of genuine tough guys that I know).
Speaking of rap music, do you want to know why more White boys buy that crap than Black boys do? You know why date rape is supposedly such a problem on college campuses*? Why binge drinking is a problem among college freshmen?
It’s a reaction: a reaction against being pussified. And I understand it, completely. Young males are aggressive, they do fight amongst themselves, they are destructive, and all this does happen for a purpose.
Because only the strong men propagate.
And women know it. You want to know why I know this to be true? Because powerful men still attract women. Women, even liberal women, swooned over George Bush in a naval aviator’s uniform. Donald Trump still gets access to some of the most beautiful pussy available, despite looking like a medieval gargoyle. Donald Rumsfeld, if he wanted to, could fuck 90% of all women over 50 if he wanted to, and a goodly portion of younger ones too.
And he won’t. Because Rummy’s been married to the same woman for fifty years, and he wouldn’t toss that away for a quickie. He’s a Real Man. No wonder the Euros hate and fear him.
We?d better get more like him, we’d better become more like him, because if we don’t, men will become a footnote to history.
"After The Pussification" - Kim Dutoit @ Splendid Isolation March 24, 2017
www dot kimdutoit dot com/2017/03/24/after-the-pussification/
For those who’ve been living on another planet for the past two decades, I once wrote a screed called The Pussification Of The Western Male, which took about an hour to write and was a stream-of-consciousness rant against the demeaning of men in Western society. The piece garnered an immediate and voluminous online response (thank you, Insty), caused my host’s (website and email) servers to crash and necessitated finding a new host because they kicked me off. The responses I got in the mail — I didn’t allow comments at that stage — were interesting. A large number, of course, were vituperative squeals from feministicals and their girlymen cohorts, and included death threats and threats of violence against me and my family. (Most of those disappeared when I responded to them by email with my home address, and an invitation to take their best shot — and to bring a gun, because I surely would.) All sorts of liberal websites climbed on, garnering me awards such as “Worst Blogger On The Internet” (although, upon recollection, that award may have been for Let Africa Sink, another crowd-pleaser).
Almost all the hysteria was pure projection, for example: “He wants men to go back to being cavemen!” when even a cursory reading of the essay would have noted that I wanted precisely the opposite.
Another example: “OMG! He wants to take the vote away from womyns!” when all I actually wrote was that giving the vote to women may not necessarily have been a Good Idea because since that time, government has become increasingly nanny-ish and intrusive (which is true in almost every country in the world, and not just in the United States). I even offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who could find — anywhere in my writings, not just in Pussification — an instance where I’d actually advocated disenfranchising women. Crickets.
What was also interesting was that I got several thousands of emails from men who agreed with me — and well over five hundred from women who likewise felt the same and were either married to Real Men themselves, or who wanted real men to come back.
What I didn’t write in the essay, and should have, was to predict that if men continued to be marginalized, they would eventually quit the game altogether — because men, accustomed to playing competitively, have a keen sense when the rules of the game are tilted against them and just quit as a result. In modern-day parlance, this would be the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement. Here’s an old joke about just that:
Once upon a time, a guy asked a girl “Will you marry me?” The girl said, “NO!” And the guy rode motorcycles and went fishing and hunting and played golf a lot and drank beer and Scotch and had tons of money in the bank and slept with lots of different women and left the toilet seat up and farted whenever he wanted and lived happily ever after.
The End.
I also didn’t predict — because, as I said, I wrote the piece in an hour and didn’t think through the process — that men would start using the outcome of feminism to their own advantage: that if women were entitled to be like men and have casual sex like men, then men could take advantage of that mindset and design a process to make the whole thing a lot easier (because men build systems; it’s what we do). Thus the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) movement, which basically teaches Beta men how to simulate being Alpha and score with women. (Alpha men already know how to seduce women, and don’t need to have it systemized and codified.) Here’s an example of how a PUA turns a situation around:
She: “You’re not my type.”
He: “You’re not my type either. But you’ll have to do until someone thinner comes along.”
It’s a masterpiece: using a prime part of female negative self-image (all women think they’re overweight, regardless of actual tonnage) to throw her off-balance and make her vulnerable to his next approach. Another classic, this time in a debate or argument:
She: A man shouldn’t date a woman for over a year without making some kind of commitment.
He: I guess I missed the memo that gave you the power to decide how I should act.
At some point, of course, men were bound to rebel against this crappy status quo; my little rant was just a precursor to the reaction. (Note that I’m not claiming any kind of authorship of, or responsibility for that rebellion — I’m not that big-headed. But I think that my rage was indicative of what was to follow.) And if those feminists and liberal girlymen had listened to what I was actually saying and not projected all their silliness onto my words, they would not have been at all surprised by situations like GamerGate, Sad Puppies, the alt-Right (an interesting take on the last can be found here), and the like.
There was also bound to be a reaction against political correctness as well as to the pussification of men — the two are linked, albeit tenuously at times. It seems clear, however, that the liberal establishment (which included feminists and academia) were blinded by their own arrogance and feelings of moral superiority. Well, guess what? Not everyone was going to submit to their little control-freak games, and now we have an interesting cultural polarization which rivals the political polarization. It’s the same phenomenon: don’t minimize me and set me apart, then complain when I create my own rules for my own game. When the rules are tilted and people feel slighted, they are inevitably going to withdraw from the process, whether it’s Brexit, MGTOW or electing Donald Trump as President.
Continue reading →there will be
a time
when we die
that others
will say
it happened so fast
so unexpected.
when in truth
the soul had been
crying
for ever so long
praying for comfort
for healing the wounds
that drained
the life
from the life
that could have
been saved.
But no one
noticed. or heard.
or cared.
How sad.
So ... Easter's over, time to put religion away until Christmas season begins in July (/snark)
I love memes; been collecting them almost as long as they've been in existence. Just saw these; seem appropriate for me.
Submitted by ghostsniper via comments ... with slight edits
Samuel Whittemore 1695-1793
Born in 1695, just 75 years after the first Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, the stone-cold hardass who would be made a state hero of Massachusetts was first unleashed on colonial America in the 1740s while serving as a Captain in His Majesty’s Dragoons – a badass unit of elite British cavalrymen much-feared across the globe for their ability to impale people on lance-points and then pump their already-dead bodies full of gigantic pistol ammunition that more closely resembled baseballs than the sort of rounds you see packed into Beretta magazines these days. Fighting the French in Canada during the War of Austrian Succession (a conflict that was known here in the colonies as King George’s War because seriously WTF did colonial Americans care about Austrian succession), Whittemore was part of the British contingent that assaulted the frozen shores of Nova Scotia and beat the shit out of the French at their stronghold of Louisbourg in 1745. The 50 year-old cavalry officer went into battle galloping at the head of a company of rifle-toting horsemen, and emerged from the shouldering flames of a thoroughly ass-humped Louisbourg holding a bitchin’ ornate longsword he had wrenched from the lifeless hands of a French officer who had, in Whittemore’s words, “died suddenly”. The French would eventually manage to snake Louisbourg back from the Brits, so thirteen years later, during the Seven Years’ War (a conflict that was known here in the colonies as the French and Indian War because WTF we were fighting the French and the Indians, and also because it lasted nine years instead of seven), Whittemore had to return to his old stomping grounds of Louisburg and ruthlessly beat it into submission once again. Serving under the able command fellow badass British commander James Wolfe, a man who earned his reputation by commanding a line of riflemen who held their lines against a frothing-at-the-mouth horde of psychotic, sword-swinging William Wallace motherfuckers in Scotland (this is a story I intend to tell at a later date), Whittemore once again pummeled the French retarded and stole all of their shit he could get his hands on. He served valiantly during the Second Siege of Louisbourg, pounding the poor city into rubble a second time in an epic bloodbath would mark the beginning of the end for France’s Atlantic colonies – Quebec would fall shortly thereafter, and the French would be chased out of Canada forever. So you can thank Whittemore for that, if you are inclined to do so.
Beating Frenchmen down with a cavalry saber at the age of 64 is pretty cool and all, but Whittemore still wasn’t done doing awesome shit in the name of King George the Third and His Loyal Colonies. Four years after busting up the French for the second time in two decades he led troops against Chief Pontiac in the bloody Indian Wars that raged across the Great Lakes region. Never one to back down from an up-close-and-personal fistfight, it was during a particularly nasty bout of hand-to-hand combat he came into possession of another totally sweet war trophy – an awesome pair of matched dueling pistols he had taken from the body of a warrior he’d just finished bayoneting or sabering or whatever.
After serving in three American wars before America was even a country, Whittemore decided the colonies were pretty damn radical, so he settled down in Massachusetts, married two different women (though not at the same time), had eight kids, and built a house out of the carcasses of bears he’d killed and mutilated with his own two hands. Or something like that.
Now, all of this shit is pretty god damned impressive, but interestingly none of it is actually what Samuel Whittemore is best known for. No, his distinction as a national hero instead comes from a fateful day in mid-April 1775, when the British colonies in the New World decided they weren’t going to take any more of King George’s bullshit and decided to get their American Revolution on. And you can be pretty damn sure that if there were asses to be kicked, Whittemore was going to be one of the men doing the kicking.
So one day a bunch of colonial malcontents got together, formed a battle line, and opened fire on a bunch of redcoats that were pissing them off with their silly Stamp Acts and whatnot. The Brits managed to beat back this militia force at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but when they heard that a larger force of angry, rifle-toting colonials was headed their way, the English officers decided to march back to their headquarters and regroup. Along the way, they were hassled relentlessly by American militiamen with rifles and angry insults, though no group harassed them more ferociously than Captain Sam Whittemore. When the Redcoats went marching back through his hometown of Menotomy, this guy decided that he wasn’t going to let his advanced age stop him from doing some crazy shit and taking on an entire British army himself. The 80 year old Whittemore grabbed his rifle and ran outside:
Whittemore, by himself, with no backup, positioned himself behind a stone wall, waited in ambush, and then single-handedly engaged the entire British 47th Regiment of Foot with nothing more than his musket and the pure liquid anger coursing through his veins. His ambush had been successful – by this time this guy popped up like a decrepitly old rifle-toting jack-in-the-box, the British troops were pretty much on top of him. He fired off his musket at point-blank range, busting the nearest guy so hard it nearly blew his red coat into the next dimension.
Now, when you’re using a firearm that takes 20 seconds to reload, it’s kind of hard to go all Leonard Funk on a platoon of enemy infantry, but damn it if Whittemore wasn’t going to try. With a company of Brits bearing down in him, he quick-drew his twin flintlock pistols and popped a couple of locks on them (caps hadn’t been invented yet, though I think the analogy still works pretty fucking well), busting another two Limeys a matching set of new assholes. Then he unsheathed the ornate French sword, and this 80-year-old madman stood his ground in hand-to-hand against a couple dozen trained soldiers, each of which was probably a quarter of his age.
…[I]t didn’t work out so well. Whittemore was shot through the face by a 69-caliber bullet, knocked down, and bayonetted 13 times by motherfuckers. I’d like to imagine he wounded a couple more Englishmen who slipped or choked on his blood, though history only seems to credit him with three kills on three shots fired. The Brits, convinced that this man was sufficiently beat to shit, left him for dead kept on their death march back to base, harassed the entire way by Whittemore’s fellow militiamen.
Amazingly, however, Samuel Whittemore didn’t die. When his friends rushed out from their homes to check on his body, they found the half-dead, ultra-bloody octogenarian still trying to reload his weapon and seek vengeance. The dude actually survived the entire war, finally dying in 1793 at the age of 98 from extreme old age and awesomeness. A 2005 act of the Massachusetts legislature declared him an official state hero, and today he has one of the most badass historical markers of all time.
www dot badassoftheweek dot com/whittemore.html
Continue reading →The American Revolution started at dawn in Lexington, Massachusetts. The Americans defeated a British force, driving them back to Boston.
The enemy doesn't wear red uniforms these days ... but their spirit still exists; among other places, still in the capital of Massachusetts.
However, lest we forget, also on this date in 1993, the Federal government showed us they were the true inheritors of the British Crown.
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”
Then he said “Good night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war:
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon, like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.
Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers
Marching down to their boats on the shore.
Then he climbed to the tower of the church,
Up the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,—
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town,
And the moonlight flowing over all.
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night-encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,—
A line of black, that bends and floats
On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats.
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride,
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,
Then impetuous stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry-tower of the old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height,
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!
A hurry of hoofs in a village-street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed that flies fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders, that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.
It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer’s dog,
And felt the damp of the river-fog,
That rises when the sun goes down.
It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.
It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.
You know the rest. In the books you have read,
How the British Regulars fired and fled,—
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - 1863
Continue reading →... but I can't avoid it any longer.
[DT: In response to: Taps For NATO]
On almost every issue under discussion today, I am either ambivalent (tariffs) or in complete agreement with Pres. Trump. He is largely doing what I elected him to do, and doing more of it than I had imagined.
The one great, glaring exception is his foreign policy. America, and Americans, will long regret his approach to handling the Russia-Ukraine war.
But first, some concessions…..
If you're going to tell me that after 20+ years of the GWOT, America is tired of being at war, that our military is worn out and under-equipped, then I'll agree with you.
If you're going to tell me that the Euros have taken our protective (and nuclear) umbrella as an opportunity to create soft semi-socialist states, then I'll agree with you.
If you're going to tell me that Ukraine is corrupt, and that a good portion of the monies that we (and others) have sent them have wormed its' way back to primarily liberal interests in our respective capitals, then I'll concede that too.
If you're going to tell me that America is coming to the end of the road in facing our own fiscal problems, then I'll agree with that as well.
Give me any of your reasons supporting why we shouldn't be helping in Ukraine, and I'll agree with each of them.
But I still think that we should.
The Europeans….our friends in Europe….are frightened to death of the future that Russia is presenting them with. These are nations to which most of us can trace our ancestry. These are friends who have been our trading partners, our allies in all sorts of endeavors, and they do not want Russia to succeed in her ambitions against Ukraine. The Danes gave Ukraine 19 F-16s….that's a complete squadron. The Dutch gave more F-16s. All totalled up, the Ukranians are said to have 90 F-16s from primarily European sources. The French have given Ukraine Mirage 2000s. The Latvian's gave all of their Stinger missiles to Ukraine. I could further mention the armor, the air defense, the blankets and bandages, and all sorts of things, and the point remains: Europe is invested in defending Ukraine.
But despite this great fear that they fear in Ukraine, there is still a greater need for more support. Take a took at this map. Scroll around and click on the countries. Would you rather look at a report? OK. Here's a report. From that report's Conclusion, with my emphases…..
"...[I]n the bigger picture, the support for Ukraine appears low. Most large donors, including Germany, the US, or the UK, only allocate around 0.2% of their annual GDP to Ukraine, while Italy, Spain, or France allocated only around 0.1% of GDP per year. These numbers are small from a historical perspective (earlier wars and crises) and can be compared to minor domestic spending priorities. In most Western countries, questionable subsidy programs, e.g. for company cars or diesel fuel, consume much larger sums of taxpayer money per year than what has been mobilized for Ukraine. Through the lens of Western governments’ fiscal budgets, aid to Ukraine thus looks more like a minor political "pet project" than a major fiscal effort.....
You'll ask: Why should I care about the Russian intent with Ukraine? Russia wants all of Ukraine, not just the 4 oblasts that they have (illegally) annexed. This was evident three years ago when they aimed straight at Kiev. It is also evident today. Here* are the conditions that the Russians are setting today for a cease fire.
1) Ukraine's neutrality…no alliances which will protect Ukraine from Russia.
2) Ukraine's effective demilitarization.
3) "De-nazification" of Ukraine.
4) No Ukrainian restrictions on the Russian language inside Ukraine.
Atop all that, the Russians require that Ukraine acknowledge the Russian annexation of Ukrainian lands.
Putting that all together, what part of that amounts to any concession from the Russians?
*BTW, I have found the Military & History Youtube channel to be a very thoughtful and balanced discussion of events in Ukraine. I encourage a full view of the video I linked, as well as of his other videos.
The rest of Europe looks at this and sees a Russia that is attempting to reconsitute the USSR. The Baltic states….Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania….believe that they will be overrun. You can see this by watching how heavily they are invested in stopping Russia in Ukraine. Poland too feels this same pressure.
These are all NATO allies, but back to the point of this post, what happens if NATO is a "zombie alliance" and that "…without US leadership, NATO cannot survive as a coherent structure….Europe will have to defend itself – and it is not ready."
If NATO falls apart, and if Europe will have to defend itself, they're going to have to provide all the support that the US used to give them. Here's what that means: Nukes. In the short term, the Poles are discussing placing themselves under a French nuclear umbrella, but for the long term, they're discussing adding that capability for themselves. [https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-tusk-plan-train-poland-men-military-service-russia/] Who else is thinking along the same lines? The Germans.
"...Today, fear is palpable as Germans are debating a question that sounds like it was taken right from the early Cold War playbooks: What if the United States abandons Europe in face of a Russian aggression? In this debate, Germans quickly come up with answers: (1) a somewhat Europeanized deterrent, based on French and British nuclear forces, (2) Germany co-financing the French force de frappe in exchange for greater security assurances from Paris, or (3) a German bomb.... [my emphasis]" https://thebulletin.org/2024/03/germany-debates-nuclear-weapons-again-but-now-its-different/
Think about that a minute. The Germans are discussing having nuclear weapons.
If NATO fails, that is where Europe is headed. I think that it is in American interests to prevent that possibility from occurring. And you do that by being involved in Ukraine….today.
Moreover, America is in a full-fledged trade war today with China. We have badgered and bribed the rest of the world into lining up with us against China. Elevated tariffs have been placed, and then paused to allow 90 days to negotiate new terms…..for every country except China. As I read Trump here, his aim is to entice as much manufacturing back into the US as possible, but failing that, to have manufacturing move away from China. I think that Trump is pissed about China's role in Covid, as well as China's expansion via their Belt-and-Road Initiative and quasi-militarily in the Western Pacific. Trump wants to bring American manufacturing back so that when the next pandemic happens, we're not forced to go begging for PPE or Pharma products. He wants us to have an independent source of key components (steel, chips) with which to build a military. He wants American jobs here, providing American products to Americans.
But what is Europe's response to this, today? They're planning to go back to Beijing in July to speak with Xi. Not meeting with the Chinese in Europe, or elsewhere. In Beijing, on Xi's terf and on Xi's terms. [https://www.reuters.com/world/eu-leaders-plan-beijing-trip-july-summit-with-chinas-xi-scmp-reports-2025-04-10/]
This is the net result of Trump's (apparant) abandonment of NATO. If you won't help us in our hour of need, then we'll think twice when the hour of need arrives for you.
Pulling away from Europe and NATO is a terrible, terrible mistake. It endangers every agreement and alliance we have. The future will be far less stable (read: "profitable") for everyone in the world without American leadership.
Continue reading →